What is GFoundry's Skills Taxonomy?
The skills taxonomy is the cross-cutting skill validation engine in GFoundry. It collects signals from Learn, Role-Play, Recognition, and Evaluation cycles to build a per-user view of which skills each person has demonstrated.
What does the skills system do?
The skills taxonomy is not a module. It is a shared engine that runs across the platform. It answers one question for every employee: which skills has this person actually demonstrated, and how strong is the evidence?
You see the result in Skills Mapping, where Dashboard shows aggregate views and Skills Catalogue shows the full skill list. The data behind those views is fed by four product areas that act as signal sources.
What is the Skills Catalogue?
The Skills Catalogue (Skills Mapping > Skills Catalogue) is the central registry of every skill the engine knows about. Every other product surface refers back to this catalog when it produces a skill signal. The same skill ID is shared by Learn skill tags, Role-Play templates, Evaluation skillsets, and Recognition Skill Tag fields.
Adding a new skill to the platform starts here: create the entry in the Skills Catalogue, then link the relevant surfaces to it. Renaming or deleting a skill in the catalog affects every surface that references it.
Where do the signals come from?
Four channels feed the engine. Each one writes evidence against a skill in the Skills Catalogue, through a slightly different mechanism:
Learn: admins attach Skill Tags directly on PDF, Video, Quiz, and Role-Play content blocks. When a learner completes that content, the linked skills receive a signal. See the dedicated article on Learn as a source.
Role-Play: the AI designer generates the role-play and assigns skills to it from the catalog. Every session a learner runs produces per-skill evidence rows, scored from the rubric. See the dedicated article on Role-Play as a source.
Recognition: Soft Skills and Hard Skills in the Recognition catalog must each be linked to a Skill Tag from the central catalog. When a peer endorses a colleague on a linked Soft/Hard Skill, the engine records a signal against the underlying Skill Tag. See the dedicated article on Recognition as a source.
Evaluation: in evaluation cycles configured as 360 evaluation, peers and managers rate the user on the skills in a Feedback 360 Skillset. Each rating is a signal. See the dedicated article on Evaluation as a source.
The whole skills engine and the Skill Tag connectors on Learn content and Recognition catalogs depend on the Tags feature being enabled on the tenant. The Role-Play channel additionally requires the role-play configuration to be active. If any of these are missing from your environment, ask the GFoundry team to confirm the enabled feature set.
How does a skill get "validated"?
Validation rules depend on the channel. The most formal rule today applies to role-play: a skill is validated when the user has at least three sessions with evidence for the skill and the average evidence score across those sessions is 0.7 or above.
For the other channels (Learn completions, recognition endorsements, evaluation ratings), the engine treats each signal as evidence of activity and combines it with role-play evidence in the per-user skill profile. The exact aggregation rule outside of role-play continues to evolve.
One important property: validation status is computed at read time, not stored. If the rule changes, the full history is re-classified instantly, with no data migration. The evidence records stay the same; only the validated flag flips.
Where do I see the validated skills?
Three places, depending on what you need:
Skills Mapping > Dashboard: tenant-wide aggregate. Use it to see which skills are well represented and which are underdeveloped across the company.
Skills Mapping > Skills Catalogue: the master list of skills the engine knows about, grouped into Level 4 and Level 5.
Per-user view: each user has a skill profile that the chatbot and the talent intelligence APIs query. The same data drives the Skills Overview tab inside Learn Content for content reviewers.
Where do I define the skills themselves?
Skill definitions live in two product areas, by design:
Modules > Recognition > Soft Skills and Hard Skills: the recognition-flavored catalog with image, description, and endorsement settings.
Modules > Evaluation & Careers > Career settings: the career-flavored catalog under Skillsets, with skill scales per job category.
Both feed the same underlying engine. Pick the entry point that matches the workflow you are configuring.